Information technology is in the core of many industries today. More and more information is being stored and processed daily for personal or professional purposes. Devices made from semiconductor materials are the foundation of modern electronics, including computers, telephones, television, radio, and many other devices. Many other machines and tools from automobiles to airplanes to washing machines contain semiconductor parts that control the operation of the device or machine. Semiconductor devices include the various types of transistor, solar cells, many kinds of diodes including the light-emitting diode, the silicon controlled rectifier, and digital and analog integrated circuits. It is a continuous challenge for the information industry to develop information storage devices and processors that are smaller and faster.
Molecular information processing is becoming increasingly popular, because molecules are versatile synthetic building blocks for a bottom-up approach to information transfer and storage. In particular, the field of molecular logic has attracted much attention. The logic behavior of molecules upon specific inputs has found potential applications in sensors, medical diagnostics, molecular memory devices and molecular computational identification (MCID) tags. Thus far, the applied logic is almost exclusively based on the underlying principle of mathematical operations performed on a system that can exist exclusively in two stable states, as introduced by George Boole. Their ease of fabrication and their wide variety of applications have made binary systems the status quo for (molecular) information processing technology.